Lessons - 2

[Swami Vishvarupananda]

Nanda wrote:

>If one's to believe in the First Cause and therefore God, how can there
>exist freewill? For if the First Cause can be termed God, then isn't the
>First Cause the sole cause of all the effects thereof?


If there was no free will, there would also be no karma associated with our
actions.
Freewill exists relative to the individual. I.e. it is as real/illusionary
as the individual, its actions and the responsibility as well as the effect
of its actions.
What I mean to say is, as long as we experience ourselves as individuals we
have a free will and we reap the results of the actions this individual is
performing. Of course from the paramartika level the individual as well as
its free will, its actions and the results, all are illusionary. So are the
heaven or hell we create for ourselves by the illusionary karma we earn and
so is the growing or lessening of avidya, and the happiness or depression,
etc brought about as a result of our actions.

Though duality is an illusion, the illusionary individual does have the
freedom of deciding his albeit illusionary karma by his also illusionary
actions. That is the law of the vyavaharika level. Non existence of free
will applies only to the 'realm' of nonduality where no action, no karma, no
thoughts, no feelings, no happiness and no pain exist either.

As long as we care not to lose our illusionary house we better do not put
illusionary fire to it otherwise we will suffer painfully (of course the
suffering is again an illusion :-) from the illusion of homelessness.

When the illusionary person decides to harm the illusionary other person,
the illusionary karma will come back to that illusionary person and give him
great illusionary pain.

They are all illusionary, yet as long as we experience them they are real
enough and if we want to ever get out of the state of avidya, something
needs to be done about it on the vyavaharika level. Merely talking about
paramarthika does not alter our state.
A person in a lucid dream knows he is sleeping and what he experiences is a
dream. But that will not alter the laws of the dream or get him out of
sleep, as long as he does not make the effort to actually wake up.

Om Om Om
Swami Vishvarupananda

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